Discussions about the curriculum of nursing refer back to the beginning of the twentieth century, bringing attempts to reorganize the teaching methods of this area. The first schools had a hospital environment and a biomedical model as a contribution for education and assistance. With the expansion of medical and hospital care, the concept of nursing was viewed as a profession committed to science. For many years, technical education was predominant, enhancing curative care which lead to the inconsistency of the health needs of the population. With the ideals of the Health Reform in the 80s, nursing tried to articulate the clinical and epidemiological dimensions from a collective perspective, culminating in the adoption of new curriculum matrices. In 2001, the publication of the curriculum guidelines recommended a generalist, humanist, critical, and reflective education. However, the readings and meanings of the proposed guidelines may suffer local interferences, causing discussions, resistances, and confrontations. These elements bring on other subjectivities about this professional. Thus, our proposal is to articulate the (re)construction of contemporary nurses' identities in scenarios of proposals and curricular changes in nursing graduate programs, seeking an understanding of how the past of curriculum matrices was/is brought to the present with the objective of producing other and new subjectivities.
nursing; curriculum; nursing education; identity